Audio 3:51
Cancer research breakthrough gives hope for new treatment

Samantha DonovanUpdated
Wed Jan 08 13:46:00 EST 2014

Researchers at Melbourne's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have discovered how to kill off a protein that plays a role in the growth of up to 70 per cent of cancers. They hope a treatment can now be developed to do the same thing but acknowledge that it will take several years.

Transcript

They say they've worked out how to kill a protein which causes diseases including leukaemia and lymphoma.

And this may now lead to the development of medicines that mimic that approach.

Samantha Donovan reports.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Researchers have known for some time that a protein called Myc is not only present in the body's healthy cells but also at high levels in about 70 per cent of all cancers.

For more than three decades scientists at Melbourne's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have been trying to work out how the protein flourishes in the body and drives cancer development.

The institute's Dr Gemma Kelly.

GEMMA KELLY: So we were interested to determine how these Myc driven cancer cells stay alive because obviously this would help to identify targets for new drugs and what we've found is that we can kill the particular cancers, the lymphoma cells, we were looking at by disabling another protein called MCL-1.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: And how do you do that?

GEMMA KELLY: So the way that we do it is genetically or using kind of drug mimicking tools in the lab, but what we would hope that in the future is that there would be specific drugs or inhibitors that would target MCL-1 which could then be used in the clinic.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Which types of cancer could this discovery ultimately help?

GEMMA KELLY: So our research is focussed on lymphomas and in particular we've done some work on a human lymphoma called Burkitt lymphoma. But as I said we know that Myc is deregulated in, it can be up to 70 per cent of human cancers, including other lymphomas, leukaemias and other solid cancers. And so we would hope that our resource would be broadly applicable to these cancers as well. But this will be something that we could determine at a future point.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Dr Kelly says one of the most exciting aspects of the team's discovery is that the lymphoma cells they were experimenting with could be killed off within 24 to 72 hours.

It's hoped that success in the lab can now be turned into a treatment for cancer patients.

GEMMA KELLY: So we already know that there are a lot of interest into developing these particular types of drugs and so we hope that in the next couple of years these will become available for us to test in our preclinical models and then this will then go on to the next stage and go into clinical trials in patients.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Some of these treatments being trialled, there are concerns that the side effects may be quite severe. The strategy that you've come up with, do you know anything yet as to the potential side effects?

GEMMA KELLY: Yeah so we have some of our own unpublished data and from other people and what this really suggests is that our cancer cells, our lymphoma cells, seem to be more susceptible to inhibition of this protein MCL-1 than the normal healthy cells. And so this suggests to us that there can be this therapeutic window whereby we can kill off the cancer cells and maybe have more acceptable kind of side effects on the normal healthy cells.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Australia's Leukaemia Foundation is one of several organisations both here and overseas funding the research.

Its national manager of support services, Anthony Steele, says patients will be cautiously optimistic about the discovery.

ANTHONY STEELE: Some of our research coming out of Australia is the best in the world. We get lots of applications and it's great to be able to find those gems that we're able to fund. One of the things is when these discoveries are made overseas and then clinical trials commence with a treatment for it, Australians don't often get access to those clinical trials and therefore have a very delayed access to treatment. Whereas if the discoveries are found in Australia, it goes to trial in Australia, Australian patients who've got no other options get access to these new therapies very early and hopefully it will lead to some very good outcomes.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: The research from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute has been published today in the journal Genes and Development.